Bad words

I just viewed a site that included an advertisement for Site Pal. If you don't know this product, it allows you to create animated avatars that speak text that you can define. It is also an obnoxious ad which starts speaking if you roll your mouse over the wrong part of the screen. But this is not the WTF.

I wasn't sure if they censored the text or not so I decided to amuse myself by seeing if I could get the avatar to say "Fuck off troll". And yes they did allow that phrase.

But the WTF moment was that the avatar enunciated the phrase as "Fuck of-f Troll". The "off" was split into two distinct verbal groups "of" and "f" that were temporally pushed up against each other.

The adv that was served up to me has text box that you can type in phrases and try them out. I went back to the same place and was served up a different adv. But I have been served up this adv many times recently.

You entered your real credit card number into a sleazy "ad" site that had already shown enough technical incompetence to end up on the forums and which you first tested with false info and found to be broken. Somewhere along the line didn't you think "Maybe this godawful site that can't even manage to build a credit card form that works at all might not be the most legitimate and safe recipient for my sensitive financial information.."? When I find a broken merchant site, my first thought isn't "Let me put in my real credit card to just to see if the morons are storing the info in a publicly-readable CSV file!!" You know, because failing basic credit card validation is a pretty good indicator that concepts like "encryption" and "not losing my financial info" are within the grasp of the developer.

If I were you I'd be cancelling my credit card right now and requesting a new number.